How to Remove a Circular-Saw-Blade Knockout Easily

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Grab a few common items from around the shop to make this job a snap.

To remove the knockout from a typical circular-saw blade, you could whale on it with your framing hammer and hope you don’t bend the blade and have to buy a new one, but there’s a better way.

Glenn Hollowell from Cordova, Alaska, discovered that a 1/2-in. machine-bolt head or nut makes a great punch to take that knockout out.

Here’s how it works: Your typical saw blade has a diamond-shaped knockout in it that needs to be removed to fit on the arbor of a lot of different kinds of circular saws. People use a screwdriver or the claws of a framing hammer, or they just hit it with a hammer to try to get that knockout out of there. What Glenn does is he places the saw blade over some kind of a recess; I’m going to use a little piece of 3-in. pipe here. And then he takes a 1/2-in. hex-head nut, which has angles on it that very closely parallel those of the diamond-shaped knockout. He centers the nut over the hole, and then he grabs his framing hammer and [bang!].